Sending links from Twitter to Google Reader made easy

The Problem

For writers, most links come from either Google Reader or Twitter these days. In the case of Google Reader, one can easily save things for later by adding a star. However, saving links from your Twitter timeline requires some sort of bookmarking system (e.g. Delicious, Instapaper or Packrati.us). This gives the writer two sets of links to keep up with, wouldn’t it be better if everything were in one place?

The Solution

Twitter has its own starring system, “Favourite Tweets”, and this category has its own RSS feed too. Therefore, a very simple way to get selected links from a Twitter timeline to Google Reader is to just subscribe to the Favourite Tweets RSS feed. This is done by going to your favourite tweet page, (e.g. http://twitter.com/davidgilson/favorites), and clicking on the RSS icon in the browser address bar.

There are two speed bumps though. First, it can take Google Reader a while to pick up updates to the favourite tweets RSS feed. Second, to keep all ‘read later‘material under Google Reader’s starred items list, all incoming twitter links will need to be starred manually.